Erik Tarloff

Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO, is running for the Republican nomination for governor of California. Armed with a considerable personal fortune, she shot out of the starting blocks early, inundating the airwaves--both radio and television--with advertising. These spots are entirely content-free, total pablum, but that hardly makes them noteworthy; most campaign ads have lacked anything resembling substance at least since it was morning in America. These do,… More »

Here's an example of a moment with which every classical music lover is familiar: There comes a point in virtually every concerto from the classical period when the orchestra comes to a sudden halt and the soloist takes flight with a couple of minutes of difficult (or at least difficult-sounding) passage-work interspersed with fragments of melody derived from what's been previously heard. This music usually culminates in an extended trill, after which the… More »

Somewhere along the line, right wingers stopped complaining about "New Deal judges"--presumably because an actual FDR-appointed judiciary had largely passed from the scene--and began assailing "activist judges" instead. There was a certain logic to it; by 1968, the appointment power had been in liberal hands for 20 28 of the previous 28 36 years, and therefore, any judicial activism on display was likely to have been liberal activism.But it was also a canard, an… More »

What is it about Sundays?They usually start fine: Liane Hansen and the estimable Will Shortz on the radio, a few cups of coffee with my weekly dose of network TV bloviation, followed by a Bach cantata or a Haydn mass on the stereo, and then an hour or so with The New York Times.But somewhere during the late morning or early afternoon, a weight begins to settle on my chest, a pervasive melancholy that evolves over the next few hours into something worse, a feeling… More »

It would be nuts to put myself in the crossfire between my friends Christopher Hitchens and William Shawcross. Americans have no dog in that particular fight, and we have enough dogs in enough fights right now that we'd be well advised to avoid the ones that don't concern us. But with that proviso, and without coming down on one side or the other, I'm still prepared to acknowledge one advantage conferred by the existence of a constitutional monarchy: A reigning… More »

It now seems clear, thanks to the reliably egregious Senator Lieberman -- when it comes to being disappointing, he never disappoints -- with the pusillanimous complicity of Senators Nelson, Landrieu, and Lincoln, that genuine health care reform, reform that provides universal affordable care, is probably dead this Congressional session. Which is not to say there will be no legislation at all; I'd be surprised if some sort of health care bill doesn't pass before the… More »

It was pure absurdist surrealism in the guise of a kids' show.I was 12 when I first saw Soupy Sales. His show was on a local LA station; this was several years before he moved his operation to New York and achieved a certain national notoriety. Twelve was the perfect age for such an encounter, really: too mature for the simple kids' entertainment that the show purported to be, but just about old enough to begin to grasp, with delighted amazement, what it was… More »

My wife and I visited New York for several days, and this past Sunday, we went to Lincoln Center to hear Bernard Haitink conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's Ninth Symphony. It was a wonderful concert in every way, but the experience led me -- not for the first time -- to think about coughing. More »

Of course, some hard-headed realists amongst us --- and not only the right-wingers and Republicans in that company --- will be skeptical. Some will even be sneering. And I don't mean to suggest such a reaction is utterly indefensible. This year's Nobel Peace Prize isn't an abomination, like the 1973 prize to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. But by even the most charitable of interpretations, it is premature, and, depending upon unforeseeable future decisions and… More »

Beautiful music can easily lull us into a state of beatific passivity. And there's nothing wrong with that; we all can use a little beatific passivity now and then. Sometimes, though, there's something to be said for staying alert and paying close attention.On virtually every commercial recording of Bartok's second violin concerto, you'll discover the same anecdote related in the liner notes: in 1936, a Hungarian fiddler named Zoltan Szekely approached Bartok… More »

It was my privilege at the beginning of my career to work with some of the great comedy writers of the World War II generation. My father first and foremost, of course --- his ghost would never forgive me for not putting him at the head of the list --- but also names like Mort Lachman, Norman Lear, Milt Josefsberg, Mel Tolkin and Larry Rhine, Bob Carroll and Madeleine Pugh, Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf. These were legendary figures to me, present at the creation… More »

This morning, reading this, I was struck all over again by how extraordinarily maladroit autocrats usually are. In the last few months, we've witnessed elections in Zimbabwe, Iran, and now Afghanistan, and in each case the heavy-handedness on display has been staggering. Can't these people at least show a little finesse when they're practicing ballot-box fraud? If they weren't so eager to prove themselves beloved by their people, if they were only willing to… More »

A British magazine, Prospect, asked me to post some thoughts about the late senator on their blog site. My entry can be found here More »

I don't support capital punishment. I've gone back and forth on this issue in my own mind over the years, and my primary objections now do not rest on purely moral grounds; I can accept in the abstract, however uncomfortably, that some acts may be sufficiently heinous to justify ending the perpetrator's life. But despite that, the racial and class discrepancies in the way the death sentence is applied are troubling, and perhaps even more troubling, the recent… More »

"I have known eleven Prime Ministers," William Gladstone is reputed to have said, "and seven of them were adulterers." To bring this discussion closer to home, we can also cite T. H. White, who wrote that in his long career covering presidential elections, only three of the candidates he'd observed had been faithful to their wives. Bear in mind that this observation wasn't restricted to actual nominees; it encompassed all viable candidates of both parties… More »

It's impossible not to feel relief and pleasure that Misses Euna Lee and Laura Ling have finally been freed by their North Korean captors. But there's been a certain misguided quality to some of the media coverage of this development attributing credit, as so much of it has, to Bill Clinton's superlative negotiating skills. This isn't meant to take anything away from the former president; he may well possess such skills, and he certainly deserves kudos for his… More »

ASPEN, COLORADO My wife had to come here for two back-to-back conferences, and I decided to tag along. What's not to tag? The setting is gorgeous, the weather perfect, the company congenial; other than a perceptible absence of oxygen --- I almost collapsed on my run this morning --- there's really nothing for even the most churlish visitor to complain about. Except perhaps the conferences themselves, which apparently concern various questions relating to… More »

Lyndon Johnson used to tell a story about a candidate for County Commissioner in East Texas. He's falling far behind, and so he asks his campaign manager what he should do. "Well," his campaign manager advises, "why don't you say your opponent likes to fuck pigs?" The candidate protests, "But he doesn't, does he?" And the campaign manager answers, "No, but can you picture him denying it?" More »

When my son was trying to decide on a college a few years ago, his choices ultimately narrowed down to two: a fancy Ivy League institution or the University of California at Berkeley. After some soul-searching, he ended up opting for the Ivy League, and my wife and I certainly didn't object. But we did impose one condition: Whenever, in future years, the well-endowed university he would be attending hit him up for a contribution, he would cheerfully give… More »